"Holy books never laugh"
– Baudelaire
"The total absence of laughter from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature"
– Alfred North Whitehead
The Sunday school Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild is a Victorian fabrication. The Gospels do not give — how could they? — Christ's every earthly moment. No one can possibly know if he ever laughed or not; it is hard to believe he did not at least smile at little children. Certainly, though, the real earthly Christ was a man of high emotions, everywhere evident in his In Your Face debates and oratory style not easily devoid of humour.
Church Fathers such as Jerome, John Chrysostom, Rufinus, and Salvian held fast that Christ never laughed. It stems from the fact that the only two New Testament mentions of laughter (Luke 6:21 and 25) occur in menacing contexts. According to Prof. Danuta Shanzer, "While one can write books on Greek Comedy or Roman Laughter, Christian Laughter would hardly make a leaflet." Elton Trueblood, a rare modern detector of Christly wit, suggests that Jesus' humour depends on a combination of ideas rather than words. Hence, lexical statistics do not tell the whole story.
D. S. Barrett has pointed to the oneupmanship humour manifest in Jewish literature of Jesus' time. Allan Gould regards the Hebrews' rebuke of Moses, "Are there no graves in Egypt, that you took us out here to die?" (Exodus 14:11) as history's oldest joke. Old Testament humour is explored in William Whedbee's The Bible and the Comic Vision. When Jesus instructs Peter on paying taxes (Matthew 17:27), he is speaking "in imaginative and humorous terms." All this places Jesus firmly in the long tradition of Jewish joking.
I ask readers to open Matthew for full texts and contexts. The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:7) verbally coruscates. The Beatitude on the meek (Matt. 5:5) prefigures Orwellian 1984's Freedom is Slavery and other paradoxes. The Greek pun on "salt of the earth" (5:13) is a popular one from Byzantine literature.
Like Hamlet, this Sermon abounds in modern quotations: Judge not, lest…; mote and beam; pearls before swine; sufficient unto the day…; by their fruits…; seek and ye shall find. No wonder "the people were astonished" (7:28), as also by his words at 13:54 and 22:3, equivalent to their amazements (8:27, 9:8, 21:20) at his miracles.
In an angry mood (11), Jesus likens sinful contemporary communities to Sodom, his way of saying you bums (literally). More verbally crude is apropos gluttony (15:17) "Cast out into the lavatory." Likewise, the Greek diminutive Kynaria in his objection (15:26) to giving children's food to dogs betokens contemptuous distaste.
When the Pharisees (22:15) wondered how to catch him out (the Greek verb pagideuo is restricted to this passage and the Septuagint) Jesus hoists them with their own petard with "Render unto Caesar…" They marvelled at his debating skills; the audience surely smiled or guffawed.
A fresh outburst (23) against scribes and Pharisees abounds with more on-the-offensive humour against Jewish prayer rituals ("Make broad their phylacteries and enlarge the borders of their garments") and legacy-hunting, also a popular pagan moralistsatirist theme.
Christ's "Thou sayest" riposte to Pilate's "Art thou the King of the Jews?" is seen by Shanzer as "clever cheek," tantamount to You Said It, Baby; another scholar, Walter Goffart, compares it to a similar Talmud exchange.
Only Matthew (16:18) has the famous word-play (could it really have been said or received with straight faces?) on Simon Peter's name: "Upon this rock I will build my church." Modern agonizing over its meaning is needless. The Greek is evidently comic, Petros (Peter) denoting a pebble, Petra an entire rock. So, the church, then, particularly the Catholic branch, is built upon a pun.
